Creating Leaders Who Listen and Dream

After three years of perseverance, the inaugural cohort of ECP’s new educational doctorate program graduated this June. At that ceremony, 19 teachers, principals, district officials, counselors, and administrators walked proudly across the stage to collect their EdD diplomas.

While they may have come from different professional backgrounds, they have a lot in common according to Pedro Nava. They’re all pioneers, groundbreakers, and leaders—precisely the kind of people who are needed to change education.

Nava, an associate professor and Director of Educational Leadership, arrived at SCU in 2020 to design and lead the new EdD in social justice leadership—a program deeply informed by Santa Clara’s Jesuit values.

“Our approach is really about creating a more equitable and humanizing society by preparing leaders to foster learning environments where everyone can thrive,” he explains, pointing to the wide range of issues that his graduates have explored—from vocational and dual language education to disabled and migrant student advocacy.

In addition to juggling the demands of full-time work and families, this initial class of students entered graduate school during a unique time, having to balance the stressors of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing political opposition towards the program’s very mission.

“Some of our leaders have caught some of the pressures from this political moment, like parents who are anxious about the anti-racist pedagogical approaches being taught,” says Nava. “Part of our role is preparing leaders who can listen and offer a research-based and community-responsive vision forward in terms of these hot button issues.”

Of course, executing a vision is half the battle. Equally important is supporting the holistic well-being of the people who carry out this work who often can feel marginalized or burnt out by the institutions they work for.

When Annie Phan EdD ’24 entered the teaching profession 8 years ago, she knew all about the teaching shortages, structural inequalities, and lack of resources she’d experience, but she wasn’t prepared for how dire things really were.

“It was hard to feel so passionate about what my amazing students needed and wanted to do, while also trying to be a human,” they recalled. “It took a devastating toll on my physical, mental, and emotional health to work in that context.”

But this feeling wasn’t just burnout, Phan later discovered. In the EdD program she learned about the term “moral injury,” which described a feeling of existential pain that comes with feeling forced to go against your core beliefs. It was exactly the despair that she and other teachers of color experienced regularly.

Phan’s research focused on combating this experience by cultivating trust, something they experienced firsthand among their peers in the EdD program, from shared snacks to commiserating over frustrations at work.

For Edith Mancera de González EdD ’24, that bonding was crucial in keeping her going through the program, and it validated the importance of community connections in knowledge-sharing, a theme that was central to her research in the program.

Pláticas, she explains, is a research methodology based on conversations that happen within communities when knowledge is co-created. It might be as simple as mothers chatting after dropping their children off at school, but it’s a powerful tool for communication, community-building, and healing.

And as a first-gen student, undocumented Mexican immigrant, and mother, it meant a lot to have this methodology affirmed within academia, which she describes as “not made for people like me.”